2014 04 03 (educon2014) emadrid urjc FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

1. About
FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs
A comparison of two ways of acquiring knowledge and skills over
the Internet
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M.
Gonz´alez-Barahona
grex@gsyc.urjc.es
GSyC/Libresoft, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
EDUCON 2014, Istanbul, April 4 2014
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

2. About
(cc) 2014 Gregorio Robles and Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona
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Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

3. About
Goal of our paper
FLOSS development can be
seen as an early MOOC. What
can we learn if so?
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

4. About
Audience
Who should/could be interested in this talk?
MOOC providers
MOOC developers, in order to create tools
Instructors who want to take ideas for their MOOC
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

5. About
Why FLOSS
About FLOSS
FLOSS projects can be
massive (> 1, 000 developers
and contributors)
FLOSS projects are open
(and free, as in free speech)
The activity is mainly
performed on-line
Geographically distributed
(i.e., multicultural)
They have been around for
at least 20 years
FLOSS engagement
FLOSS survey 78% of
developers join a FLOSS
community “to learn and
develop new skills”
67% of the developers
continue their participation
to “share knowledge and
skills”
30% state they participate
to improve their career
opportunities
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

6. About
Comparison
Comparison FLOSS projects MOOCs
Learning process Informal Formalized
Learning goal Implicit Explicit
Roles Many roles Few roles
Interaction Community-based xMOOCs, cMOOCs
Starting time Anytime Sometimes limited
Success Win-win even if small Usually complete course
Specialization Possible Usually not possible
Analytics Mature; accessible Early stages; accessible?
Table: Summary of learning in FLOSS projects and MOOCs
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

7. About
Organization / specialization
The onion model (Crowston & Howison, 2004)
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

8. About
Joining / integration
Lots of research on FLOSS joining / integration (i.e., learning):
Joining script (von Krogh et al.)
Time from first contribution to part of core: 30 months
(Herraiz et al.)
Activities that determine who gets integrated more often into
the project (Gharehyazie et al.)
Software analytics to identify mentors among experience
developers (Canfora et al.)
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

9. About
Some, interesting Outcomes
Many software development analytics repositories for
researchers from researchers
“Raw” data
Processed data
Higher-level methods
How do developers specialize (Basilescu et al.)
Assess candidates from GitHub (Capiluppi et al.)
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

10. About
Summary
FLOSS can be considered as learning environments
To some extent they can be considered as early MOOCs
There is lot of research on how FLOSS developers got
integrated
The educational community can borrow some ideas from
FLOSS to use them in MOOCs
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs

11. About
FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs
A comparison of two ways of acquiring knowledge and skills over
the Internet
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M.
Gonz´alez-Barahona
grex@gsyc.urjc.es
GSyC/Libresoft, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
EDUCON 2014, Istanbul, April 4 2014
Gregorio Robles, Hugo Plaza-Garc´es, Jes´us M. Gonz´alez-Barahona FLOSS Projects as early MOOCs